Co-designing Educational Games for Classrooms

Over the past 15 years, various government agencies in Singapore have supported educational game development and research, producing multiple digital games (e.g., Legends of Alkhemia, Statecraft X), and non-digital games (e.g., Green City Blues, Money Matters). Although these games had been successful as research tools used to investigate gamebased learning, their impact in schools has been limited by contextual factors including the school environment and culture (Chee et al., 2014). Further, little is documented regarding the details of designing educational games for these contexts. This paper describes the challenges I faced as a new researcher in Singapore tasked with designing new educational games that could simultaneously be used as research tools while also serving as effective, sustainable learning experiences in classrooms in Singapore. Although research-based educational games in Singapore and around the world have been created to instantiate and test theories of learning, these games have often been created without much attention given to classroom practicality and longer-term sustainability. This paper recounts this process and describes the constraints that were faced. By describing the conditions and constraints from the development process, the author hopes to inform and improve the design of future research/educational games that can have lasting and significant impact on Singapore student learning.